


We Are the Next Time Around

by skypirateb



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 16:14:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3735319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skypirateb/pseuds/skypirateb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hades and Persephone through the centuries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are the Next Time Around

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to chellerrific for beta'ing.

Back then she was just a girl, ripped from her mother’s clinging arms and safe house, pushed into a marriage at the perfect age and yet far too soon. He was a dark and imposing uncle she had never seen or heard of, with pale sunken cheeks and lips thinner than the cord around his waist. He sat on an obsidian throne, still and hard, blending with the rock, the supplicants before him terrified to meet his eyes. The palace was vast, labyrinthine; her footsteps echoed for what seemed an eternity. No flowers bloomed in her wake. Nothing grew in this land of the dust of bones and lost souls. It was as full of nothingness as he was. Her stomach churned when he approached her. Yet his hands were so warm, and his hair was so soft, and his words were reverent. He looked at her with a tenderness that made her ache. He wanted this world to blossom as she did. She cried for so many reasons those months, but in the end she cried for the love of him, and gorged herself on the food of his house.

 

* * *

 

 

Later she was the daughter of a countess, the bastard of the king, though she wasn’t to know that. She hitched up her skirts and rode out with her girl companions, and they raced through the fields and hills of the grand estate that had been bequeathed to her mother as a bribe. She had been raised among her mother’s horses, she knew every rise and fall of the remote county, she easily out-stripped her companions. Galloping down the slope of a glen, she saw a strange man, tall and dressed in an astonishing blue; surely no real noble would wear such a colour. It made him pop out garishly against the landscape of fresh green grass and vivid red poppies and sunny yellow daffodils. Her horse slowed to a canter, and then a trot; she could see as she approached that he was pale as the driven snow with hair as dark as ebony. But still he was no-one she knew; she knew everyone around here. This man was a rent in the fabric of her small world. His blood red lips curved into a sardonic smile that made her heart gallop like her horse. Close up, the blue of his garments brought out the colour of his eyes. He was angular and bony and fey looking, and she was astonished by how utterly taken with him she was. And so she grabbed him up with her own strength and rode all the way back to the little castle, where she locked them together in the tower until the king himself came all the way from Westminster to bless the union.

 

* * *

 

 

Then she had to take food to her grandmother. It struck her as wrong—she couldn’t remember ever having a grandmother—but her mother packed up the basket and pushed her out the door into the first winter snow. It drifted down around her like ash from a chimney, sticking to her clothes and obscuring the dregs of autumn leaves. Because she was a good girl who listened to her mother, she stayed on the path well-travelled. There was danger in the woods; thieves and hunters and wild men. She hurried along the trail, pulling her hood around her head and tucking her small hands inside the pockets of her cape. She could hear snaps and crackles in the underbrush. Someone was following her, or maybe something; now and then it sounded like there was four feet rather than two, and she heard the snap of a jaw that sent a thrill through her heart. When she arrived at the little cottage she was not surprised to find it cold with no grandmother in the bed and no fire in the grate. She had no grandmother. On the bed, spread across the quilt in a grandmother’s place, was a large dark wolf. She took the small butter knife out of her basket and ran the blade down the wolf’s spine, so his coat split open to reveal a broad human back. He watched her untie her pretty white dress, and begged her to keep the little red riding hood on, and tugged her into bed with him. She laughed when he growled against her neck and said _I have missed you, wife_.

 

* * *

 

 

Soon enough her father parlayed her away as part of a contract, or a bet, or something where she was chattel with the rest of his belongings. She should have been terrified, or at least offended, but she knew what was coming by now. Another cavernous house, another solitary life, another garden in desperate need of her care. And he was so large he filled up a room, and his pelt was matted with heaven-knows-what, and he smelled worse than his triple dog had ever smelled—but it was him. He scowled, he growled, he paced, but he still looked out at her with the self-same eyes, the eyes that had been following her for centuries, as blue and as sharp as glass. She laughed when he tried to balance on the Rococo chairs at the dinner table, far too small for even one of his buttocks. When he barked at her and informed her that these chairs had been in the palace of Catherine the Great, she laughed even harder and asked if he had taken the tacky gilded sculpture from there, too. At night she curled up on top of him, knotting her fingers into the fur on his chest, and fell asleep with the deep thrum of his heart in her ears. In the morning she woke to his naked limbs tight around her, his wedge nose pressed into her neck, his breath shallow on her skin. She traced her hands all over his bare body and woke him with her deft fingers.

 

* * *

 

 

Much, much later, she was in a field hospital. There was death in the air; it stuck at the back of her nose and her throat and made her want to heave. She tourniqueted a man’s arm, helped to saw off another man’s foot, and held a bucket under the head of a third so he could vomit. She wasn’t ready when she found him, though, half his leg blown off, blood dripping from the stump, his eyelids fluttering as fast as his shallow breath. This couldn’t be right this couldn’t possibly be right. When she grasped his hand it was cold and getting colder; she turned his head towards her so her tears fell on his cheek. His wandering gaze found her face, and there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before they turned glassy. For the first time she wanted to scream and tear her hair and beat her chest with the bitterness and the waste of it all. She wanted to curse and spit and burn everything to the ground. But she had to keep going. The men kept coming in on stretchers all bloody and moaning and septic and she could hear the gunfire and the planes and the shells and the shells and the shells and she wondered what the hell she had done that she had been sent here. The morning after the battle they found her body with half her head splattered on a wall and a service revolver clutched _riger mortis_ in her fist.

 

* * *

 

 

The freezing rain is stinging her cheeks. Winter isn’t due for another five weeks, but the cold is already seeping into her joints and her marrow. A violent gust of wind throws a face full of ice water in under her hood. Spitting and swearing, she blindly pushes herself into the nearest shop.

 

It is the kind of place she never dreams of going into otherwise. A small second-hand bookstore, tucked between a tattoo parlour and a game store. Despite the warmth of the shop, her hands are shaking. Goose pimples race up her arms and down her spine. Tears prickle in her eyes. _It can’t be_ , she thinks, and yet she already knows she’s right. A dog, a Rottweiler maybe, has been thumping his tail from the moment she walked in. He hasn’t moved from where he is curled on his bed, but she knows it is a he. It always is.

 

Tentatively, she steps around the shelves. They are mismatched, and marked with handwritten signs— _History, Classical Studies, Folklore, Fantasy_ —and so stuffed with books that they spill down into tidy piles on the floor and in plastic bins. Somewhere a radio is quietly playing classical music, and she knows it will be a radio on an AM frequency rather than a laptop, because he never has kept up with technology.

 

And suddenly he’s there, right behind the counter. She knows it’s him. He’s wearing a granite coloured jersey and glasses this time, but it’s him. He has the same ebony hair, the same crease between his brows, the same tapered fingers that know her body. Her heart is racing. She has been looking for him in funeral parlours and banks and even behind judge’s benches. All the wrong places; of course he’s here. This is who he is, more than a mortician or a banker or a judge. He’s a host, a keeper; he’s surrounded by lost and forgotten books with cracked spines and missing pages, their authors whispering stories to him long after they have died. And he will remember them all.

 

“It’s you.”

 

He looks up. He freezes. His lips—thin lips, blood red lips—part as he murmurs, “Persephone?”

 

She grins. It tingles all over her body. “Yes.”

 

He pushes his way out from his meagre throne flanked by a cash register and an adding machine, trips his way towards her, reaches out to her as if he hardly believes she is real. His expression is still fixed in shock, but his eyes betray him. It is always his eyes.

 

“You found me.” He chokes on his words. “I was… concerned. I didn’t know how I could…”

 

Persephone smiles. He is warm. He smells like earth. He threads his fingers through her hair and places kisses all over her face. She raises herself up onto her toes and touches their foreheads together.

 

“Do you have anything we can eat?”

 

He laughs, his eyes glittering. “Yes,” he manages to say. “Yes, my darling, I do.”


End file.
